Press Release

July 2009, Philadelphia, PA – Locks Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by Thomas Chimes. Thomas Chimes: Early Works (1958–1965), will be on view at Locks Gallery from September 10th through October 16th, 2009. There will be a public reception on Friday, October 2nd, from 5:30 to 7:30pm. An illustrated catalogue with an essay by Lisa Saltzman will be available.

In memoriam of the artist Thomas Chimes (1921–2009), Locks Gallery will present the artist’s earliest mature body of work - landscape and crucifixion paintings completed between 1958 and 1965. These works have expansive and vividly colorful compositions filled with both abstracted symbols and recognizable imagery.

Chimes’ work was recently seen in his 2007 retrospective, Thomas Chimes: Adventures in ‘Pataphysics, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The exhibition presented works from each period in the artist’s career and reflected his diverse interests in alchemy, astronomy, James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, the writing of Alfred Jarry, and Greek poetry in the form of celestial, white and gold paintings.

The exhibition’s curator, Michael Taylor, described the influence of Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ on Chimes’ work from this period as well as the artist’s extensive travels in postwar Europe in the early ‘50s. In the accompanying catalog for the current exhibit, art historian Lisa Saltzman writes of an artist grappling with the aftermath of World War II: “At once landscape and still-life and yet also, neither landscape nor still-life, Chimes’ early paintings pursue the subject of human suffering and sacrifice.”

With a career spanning over five decades, the work of Thomas Chimes is in the collections of such museums as the Allentown Art Museum, Corcoran Museum of Art, Delaware Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Phoenix Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Wadsworth Atheneum Art Museum and Yale University Art Gallery. He has exhibited at institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin; The Institute of Contemporary Art, PA; The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; and The National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated catalog with an essay by Lisa Saltzman, a compendium to the previously published catalogue, Thomas Chimes: Confronting the Unconscious, published in 2005.